Ola Vs Uber: Who Rules the Road?

Getting late for a meeting or a party? Who would you choose to be your charioteer in the race against time? Transportation networking has seen a cardinal development over the course of time. Ola and Uber are the major cabs hailing services in India. The battle to lead the Indian market is undoubtedly cut-throat. But which one is the preferred cab service? The home-brewed Ola or the US-based Uber? The answer to this question is definitely not as plain as a pikestaff. So, we thought of turning to Artificial intelligence to help us decide the ultimate road runner. Let’s find out who wins the Ola vs Uber challenge.

While performing a machine learning analysis on Ola vs Uber, we tracked all the tweets concerning Ola and Uber. After a week-long of tracking, we gathered the following insights:

Ola vs Uber strike 1:

Region- Wise Relative Popularity:

We collected the region-wise positive sentiment tweets for these two using our Sentiment API and calculated the relative percentage difference. The following graph demonstrates the popularity of Ola and Uber in 5 major Indian states. Each state depicts the most positive mentioned company pinned on it along with a percentage score.

As seen in the image, Ola has relatively more positive sentiment tweets than Uber in Maharashtra and National Capital Region (NCR). Ola also maintains the lead in Karnataka. While in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, there are more Uber fans. These statistics might owe to a little background here among other things.

Ola vs Uber strike 2:

Uber Hits Home Run In Tamil Nadu

Uber signed a Memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Tamil Nadu government in 2014 to create 30,000 jobs opportunities for economic development of the state and is expected to invest $50 million in the next 3 years. These marketing efforts by Uber helped it expand its market in these states at a mercurial rate. It qualifies for a neat move on Ola vs Uber tussle.

Ola vs Uber strike 3:

Ola launches Ola Play service

During the course of tracking tweets for both these services, Ola launched Ola Play services which were widely considered to be a strategic move by Ola to outplay arch-rival Uber. At least on social media, it created a lot of buzzes and as a result, Ola pipped Uber in terms of positive mentions from places like Delhi NCR. Ola makes an impressive comeback in the Ola vs Uber punch-up.

Ola vs Uber final strike:

Ola Gets Uber-appreciation in Karnataka:

The state government suspended ride-hailing services provided by Ola and Uber in April 2016 as per the Karnataka On-demand Transportation Technology Aggregator rules, 2016. These rules required businesses to hold an effective license issued under these rules. Ola received its license in June 2016 for 100 vehicles that were inspected and found equipped with a digital meter, panic buttons, printer and also stuck to the demand for taxi signs. On the other hand, Uber is still waiting to get the license as the 30 cars submitted for the verification failed to abide by the On-demand Transportation rules. The “space-age” crowd in the state knows what suits them best. Also, no one would compromise their safety. This poses a struggle for Uber in a major Indian market.

Ola and Uber have nearly similar popularity in Northern India with Ola having slightly more positive sentiments overall. The market share is also half and a half in South India with a similar share of struggles to dominate the market. According to the insights, this is a win-win situation. Ola and Uber both have a huge line of customers. Ola vs Uber challenge gives us no clear winner.

In conclusion, on a scale of 1 to Pizza, how would you like to rate the preference of Ola and Uber now? We recommend you to order a pizza instead.

At Karna-AI, a ParallelDots product, we deploy a range of cutting-edge AI techniques to derive meaningful insights from large chunks of unstructured text. This can be of great use to brands, market research companies and consulting agencies of all kinds. If you have any questions or suggestions, we would love to hear from you. our social media handles Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Medium.